Blog
The Winter of Our Discontent — and the Hope of Summer
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Richard III, Shakespeare As 2020 slouches into the past—and good riddance—it seems that this winter is...
Happy Christmas
History is filled with acts of barbarity, and modern history has more than its share. One of the most barbaric battlefields was the Western Front in World War I, when the two sides were locked in an endless and brutal war of attrition, each side dug into a complex...
Infamy
On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese Empire attacked the United States Pacific Fleet as it lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor. The event, described by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a ‘Date which will live in Infamy’ brought the United States into World War II. Some...
History—A Fresh Canvas or a Finished Landscape?
When I was growing up in England, history consisted of an endless line of kings and queens, punctuated by frequent wars fought mostly against the French. This cheerful view of history (we always beat the French) culminated in our recent triumph in World War II. The...
Infinite Stakes—Where Fact and Fiction Merge into ‘Faction’
The title of my novel Infinite Stakes comes from Winston Churchill’s description of the Battle of Britain in 1940 —“the odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite.” In this battle, which lasted from July until September, 1940, Hitler’s Luftwaffe air...
Reflections on the Battle of Britain
Reflections on the Battle of Britain and our debt to the ‘few’ “The odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite.” —Churchill Forgive this longer post, but there is much to say and our debt is great. The Battle of Britain is one of the most remarkable...
